How to Burn a CD with Windows XP

Did you know that Windows XP has built in CD burning? It does! For data backups, the method that Windows provides is often times quicker and more painless than using a product like Roxio Easy Media Creator or Nero. You can even use Windows Media Player to burn music.

If you like the Windows flavor to everything, that is.

So how do you use Windows XP to burn CDs (click on screenshots for full size)?

1. First off, we need to enable the CD drive for recording if it isn’t already? To do this, we open “My Computer” and right-click on the CD drive. Choose Properties from the menu.



2. This will open up the properties dialog for the drive. It is similar to other properties dialogs except it is specific to the CD drive. Click on the Recording tab and ensire that the following settings are enabled: Enable CD recording on this drive, Local Drive C: is chosen for temporary hard drive space, and write speed is set to Fastest (you may have to set this to another speed if you encounter buffer underrun or overflow errors when burning).

Once this is done, the only thing that needs to be done is drag and drop to the CD drive. A prompt will appear alerting you to files waiting to be written to the CD. From there you can burn away!